It is safe to say that at the time he wrote Titus
Andronicus he simply lacked the means to do, or even
to envisage, what he achieved later, and his treatment
of silences is an illustration of this. Impossible
on the printed page (in the sense that a blank space
can stand in no relation to the absence of speech
in a context of talk), silence can be a feature
of oral rhetoric, and was proverbially valuable. 'In
plentiful speech there is always something to be
censured,' says a proverb. Loquacity was deplored,
but held to be quite different from eloquence, which
was praised, though perhaps not in women,
where it could be a sign of unchastity. And silence
itself could be eloquent. When nothing is said,
runs another proverb, silence speaks. That silence
could make a contribution to eloquence, that in the
theatre you didn't have to lay everything out with
the utmost explicitness and could treat silence
itself as requiring many words..., was evidently
a discovery Shakespeare made in the course of time.

...

What happened in the fifteen years or so between
Titus
Andronicus and Coriolanus is the main
subject of this book. There were great changes
in both dramatist and audience. Shakespeare
became, between 1594 and 1608, a different sort
of poet; as in the study of all artists, connections
between early and late remain detectable, but the
manner and purpose of his activities are
transformed...

What should be said about this transformation?
That it occurred, substantially, in the course of the
greatest decade of English drama; that it happened
in the writing of Shakespeare and in the ears of
an audience he had, as it were, trained to receive
it. We register the pace of the speech, its sudden
turns, its backtrackings, its metaphors flashing
before us and disappearing before we can consider
them. This is new: the representation of excited,
anxious thought; the weighing of confused
possibilities and dubious motives; the proposing
of a theory or explanation followed at once by its
abandonment or qualification, as in the meditation
of a person under stress to whom all that he is
considering can be a prelude to vital choices ...
Shakespeare['s] later language, and so his theatre,
does not lose all contact with the eloquence of
his early work, but moves deliberately in the direction
of a kind of reticence that might ... be thought
close to silence.
-Frank
Kermode, Introduction to Shakespeare's Language

It is no surprise that when you run an Internet search on "William Shakespeare"
you produce literally thousands of hits. Though many extravagant
claims are made for the Bard (for example, Harold Bloom's recent study
was subtitled "The Invention of the Human", an act for which he allots
Shakespeare responsibility), it is surely no exaggeration to say that he
is the greatest author of all time and that he had a greater influence
on the English language than any other single person. It is impossible
to imagine what our language and literature would be like today had he
never written. But it is also true that much of the language of his
plays simply defies our comprehension. The fact that the plays are
400 years old now and that the Elizabethan theater was a popular medium,
and so lent itself to slang terminology and vernacular speech, have obviously
contributed to the difficulty. It's just not reasonable to suppose
that modern readers would be equipped to pick up on all of the archaic
usages, topical allusions and colloquialisms that he employs. However,
most Shakespeare criticism tends to focus not on the language of the plays
but on their plots, on the themes developed within, and on the psyches
of the characters.

Now comes the renowned literary critic and Shakespeare scholar, Frank
Kermode, with a book devoted exclusively to trying to penetrate those thickets
of language and to returning Shakespeare's actual words to a central place
in our examination of his work. He makes a couple of interesting
arguments--not wholly his own--that in the less literate times when Shakespeare
wrote, his audience's had been trained to listen better than we and to
process what they heard more efficiently; that even then Shakespeare intentionally
crafted much of the obscure language and the difficult grammatical constructs
in order to reflect a new complexity in the thought processes of his characters;
and that, as Samuel Johnson believed, the author may not always have been
able to sort out what he was saying himself, but retained what he had written
both for it's intrinsic beauty and because even his own confusion served
his purposes of complexification. In essence, he was transforming theater,
such that the drama of the play became not just the action on stage but
also the conflict and chaos within the minds of the characters.

After an Introduction, where he lays out his case, Kermode then briefly
surveys all of Shakespeare's
work prior to 1594, the point at which he feels the change in styles
really takes off. Then in Part Two of the book he goes play-by-play
into the language of all 16 of Shakespeare's later works. He examines
the playwright's technique in detail, his uses of repetition, of contradiction,
of doubling (the play within a play or two stories in the same play which
closely parallel one another), even of silence. Without ever losing
site of the plot, the characters and the themes developed, Kermode demonstrates
time and again the shear genius of Shakespeare's wordplay.

In all honesty, there can't be many people, certainly not me, who can
follow everything that Kermode's talking about here. Who, after all,
has actually read or seen all of the plays? He has made an earnest
effort to keep the book geared towards the non-expert, but the casual assumption
that we'll recognize speeches and lines from dozens of different plays
gives us a little too much credit. However, I happen to have recently
read Julius Caesar, Richard
III, King Lear and Othello, and I found
his chapters on each to be a tremendous help in deciphering the language
of the text. Plus, it's comforting to know that for 400 hundred years
scholars have been baffled by the same passages that you are.

This is a book to be read first in one fell swoop, just to marvel at
Kermode's mastery of his subject, but then to be kept on a shelf nearby,
so that you can dip in to individual chapters on the various plays as you
see or read them. I assure you, reading the book will give you a
fresh appreciation for the grandeur of Shakespeare's body of work and will
send you scurrying to the original texts.